


Five Times Clint Wished for a Real Family and One Time He Didn't Have To

by raiining



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Things, Clint Barton deserves nice things, Gen, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:52:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raiining/pseuds/raiining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint tries not to think about it very often, but sometimes it's nice to have a fantasy to disappear into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Clint Wished for a Real Family and One Time He Didn't Have To

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pine Lake Oasis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106088) by [infiniteeight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteeight/pseuds/infiniteeight). 



> So there's this line in Infiniteeight's fabulous "Pine Lake Oasis" fic where Clint makes up his cover story a _little_ too quickly to have just come up with it on the spot and thinking about that gave me way too many feels. 
> 
> Massive thanks you's to infiniteeight for not only letting me play in her sandbox, but for taking the time to edit this fic for me as well. THANK YOU!!!  
>  
> 
> Warnings for graphic depiction of torture

1.

Clint tries not to think of it very often. He's thirteen after all, old enough to perform with Trickshot on-stage and old enough to know what is and isn't possible in this world. 

George ruffled his hair today, though. It probably wasn't supposed to be a big thing. Clint'd stuck around after his chores were done to help him dismantle the Big Top, and George had walked up to him after they were done and ruffled his hair, kind of like he was saying thank you without using words. 

Clint had blushed and ducked his head and George'd laughed. He had a nice laugh, deep and booming, not like Trickshot's, which always sounded mean.

Clint'd pushed his feelings away at the time, because he's a big kid and Barney says he shouldn't get mushy about things like that. Now, though, lying awake in Trickshot's trailer as they drive towards the next small town, Clint takes the memory out of its box and relives it. 

It'd felt nice when George'd ruffled his hair. Like it was something he did all the time. Clint wonders what it would be like if he did. If they didn't live here in the circus, if George had found him at the orphanage, maybe. George wouldn't have worked in the circus if that'd happened, he'd have done something else. Construction, maybe. He'd have decided he wanted a kid, not a young kid but someone older, someone who could help him out around the house. Cause he'd have a house, yeah – an older house, a little rough, something that needed some repairs. He'd have bought it cheap, but it would have been too big for one person, so he would've decided to get a kid to share it with.

And Clint, he's a big kid. Hardworking. George would have seen him and known that, somehow. He would have adopted Clint and brought him home and they would've spent Saturday morning's working on the house. George would teach him how to use a hammer and do a little wiring. When Clint hurt himself – he always hurts himself, Trickshot says he's the clumsiest fucking kid he's ever seen – George would have dropped whatever he'd been doing and come over right away. He'd kneel down in front of Clint and look at the finger or thumb or whatever it was that he hurt and get him a bandage. He'd wrap it up good and tight and then maybe they'd go inside and have some cocoa or something. Maybe spend the afternoon watching cartoons.

Yeah. That'd be nice.

Clint turns over in bed and draws the covers up over his head. He makes a little cocoon of space for himself where nothing else exists. Not the sounds of the road or the feel of the tires or the reality of stopping in the morning and having to set up the circus again. He makes a place where he can pretend. 

Just for a little while.

 

2.

Clint does a lot of thinking in the hospital.

There isn't much else to do, not when he's got two broken legs and can't afford a TV subscription. The lounge is all the way down the hall and he has to call a nurse to get him into a wheelchair if he wants to hang out there. The nurses are really nice, but they're starting to get suspicious because he's been here three days already and no one has come to visit him. He knows they're going to start asking questions soon.

Clint thinks about everything he should have done differently, everything he should have done _right_. He probably should have said something years ago, or maybe he should have gone to the police with his suspicions. He knows they're basically useless and they'd never have listened to a seventeen year old, but he could have tried. He definitely shouldn't have taken on Trickshot or the Swordsman alone. That hadn't been a good plan.

Clint sighs and looks around his hospital room. He tries not to let his eyes linger on the empty doorway, tries not to hope that someone is going to walk through it. He knows the circus is gone. They've moved on by now, and he doesn't know what lies Trickshot will have told them when Clint failed to check in before they left. He doesn't even know if anyone's noticed that he's gone. 

He holds out for another day. After that the pain and the loneliness get to be too much. The nurses offer him morphine but Clint knows that every shot goes on a chart somewhere and it's all adding up into a hospital bill he absolutely can't pay. Which sucks because he fucking _hurts_. He hurts absolutely everywhere and maybe it wouldn't be bad, just for a little while, to pretend. 

To pretend that someone _did_ notice he wasn't with the circus when they left town. Someone like Ruth. Ruth is the Bearded Lady and she's always been a nice to him, nicer than most people have been. She always gives him extra when it's her turn to cook and sometimes she winks at him, this private little smile like Clint is someone important. Someone she cares about. Clint lets himself pretend that she notices that he's not there.

She notices and she's not sure what to do about it, so she tells George. George is still one of the good ones at the circus. He's gone from being one of the guys who help put up and take down the tents to being in charge of the entire operation. Maybe he's noticed too, because Clint still tries to help out when he can.

So Ruth goes to him and George says he knows and they think about what they could do. They check the hospitals because that's usually the first step and sure enough they find him. They walk through that door right there and say, "Clint! We found you! Trickshot said you'd left but we knew he was lying. You'd never have left without saying goodbye."

They hug him and say they're going to help. Maybe George finally won on the pulltab lottery tickets he pretends he doesn't buy. Maybe he won big. Maybe he's been staying with the circus, wondering what he's going to do and where he's going to go, and now that Clint's hurt and Ruth is here he decides that enough is enough. He and Ruth buy a house and everyone in town thinks they're together and that Clint is their kid. They don't tell anyone that George is gay and Ruth is his beard and Clint is someone else's son, someone else's all together. 

So Clint gets better and when it's time to leave the hospital they show up in this rundown van that George has bought. Ruth is good with cars and she tells Clint with a wink that he can help her fix it up. They help him into the van and they drive to the house that George has bought. 

The house is always the same in his fantasie's – old and run down, but just needing a little love. He and George fix it up and it's better now that they're doing this when Clint is older, because he can help out more. They repair the windows and reshingle the roof and Ruth tinkers with the car in the driveway. Maybe Ruth gets a job at a diner in town. 

They can't totally pay off the hospital bill but George talks to somebody who talks to somebody who knows someone who can help. Clint meets with a social worker but it's okay because they don't try to take him away – he has George and Ruth now. Clint works out an arrangement whereby he works at the hospital every weekend until he's eighteen. He does laundry and works as a porter and slowly pays off his bill. Maybe he likes it so much he keeps working there even after it's paid off and starts putting money away towards school or something.

Maybe he even goes to college.

Clint blinks and looks away from the door. It's okay if he cries, he tells himself as tears leak down his face and onto his sheets. There's no one here to see.

 

3.

Clint's twenty-two and a stone cold mercenary but sometimes it's still hard to fall asleep at night. 

He's not plagued by the lives he's taken or anything – he's fought hard to stay independent and not side with any of the gangs. It means he doesn't have backup if something goes wrong and he has to do everything himself, but it's worth it to be able to pick and choose his contracts at will. Clint's gotten good at figuring out which asshole actually deserves an arrow through the eyeball and which he shouldn't take out. He hadn't thought research would be so important in his life, but a little time and effort saves him a lot of soul-searching in the middle of the night.

It doesn't actually help him fall asleep, though. Things have been getting more difficult lately – he's gone from a bottom-dwelling mercencary to a relatively well-known name, and that means he's been accumulating enemies as well as lucrative offers. Clint knows he can't keep this up forever. If he gets tired, he'll get sloppy, and if he gets sloppy, he'll get dead. That's the circle of life.

Tonight, though, he needs a little something. He aches down to the bottom of his soul and there's really only one cure for that. The fantasy is still bright and perfect in his mind. Over the years a few details have changed, but the core remains the same.

This time, Clint lets himself imagine what might have happened if he hadn't had a brother. It makes him feel a little bad but he hasn't seen Barney in over six years by this point so it's not enough to make him stop pretending. His parents were still killed in a car accident, like they actually were, but after that... after that he goes to the orphanage and there's no Barney to take him away. He stays with the other kids until he's older, maybe ten or eleven, or thirteen or so. Thirteen means he's old enough to know how lucky he is when George and Ruth decide to take him home.

They don't adopt him, Clint knows by now that things don't usually work out that way. They foster him, though. They get a little money for taking him in and that's how they get by. George works in construction but he's laid off every fall. Ruth's a cook in a diner so she doesn't make tips. They have some money but it's not enough, so they foster kids sometimes. It's usually just for a couple of months at a time but they decide that Clint is special. He's hardworking and he's good around the house. He doesn't have a knack for cars or anything, but he's got small hands and Ruth likes to have him putter around with her in the garage.

They decide to keep him until he turns eighteen. Clint works and they put some money away. They give him a good start. He never has his legs broken and he never turns to crime. He gets into college on an archery scholarship and goes into...

Clint laughs to himself and turns over in bed. Into what? There isn't anything he's good at but killing people. 

He lets the fantasy blur in his mind. He needs to get some sleep. Tomorrow is another day. 

 

4.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is weird

Clint's known that since day one, but that doesn't make it any less true. It's a _good_ weird, though, which actually makes it even more strange, because Clint's not used to good weird in his life.

They keep _giving_ him things. First it was a custom bow. Clint had been deeply suspicious of that, but his skill with a bow was the reason they'd hired him in the first place so he told himself it wasn't too strange. Then they kept giving him backup, even on op's he could very clearly do himself. Clint had protested enough times that he'd been labelled as disruptive and sent to have a talk with the Director. Fury had made it clear that working with S.H.I.E.L.D. meant working with a team and it wasn't a reflection on how much they did or did not trust him to complete the objective on his own.

Now apparently they were giving him flight lessons and just – what? What _even_?

"I noticed you like to watch the quinjets take off and S.H.I.E.L.D. encourages its agents to have a multitude of skill sets," Coulson is saying, looking confused. "Do you _not_ want to learn how to fly?"

"Of course I want to learn how to fucking fly!" Clint shouts at his handler, unable to restrain himself. "You know that!"

"Yes, I do," Coulson says, blinking. He stares at Clint. "I'm not sure I see what the problem is here."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Clint mutters before storming off. 

"So you'll be there at oh eight hundred Monday morning?" Coulson calls after him.

Clint flips his handler the bird in response. 

He spends the rest of the day on the range, trying to get his head screwed back on straight. He expects a strongly worded e-mail from Coulson any minute now, lecturing him on how telling your superior officer to fuck off isn't considered an appropriate response. Maybe he'll get a five-paragraph treatise on how to properly say thank you like a real human being. Coulson's kind of a dick like that.

Only nothing appears in his inbox except an instruction booklet with course details and an electronic textbook that he can access via starkpad. Clint realizes his hands are shaking as he replies to the email, confirming that he'll be off the regular duty roster for the duration of his 'education sabbatical'.

Standing in the shower later that night, Clint wishes he had someone he could talk to about this stuff. Someone who understands, who he could call and just say, "They keep fucking trying to give me shit and I don't know what to do."

He dips his head under the spray and thinks about it. If he'd had somebody's phone number from the circus, maybe he'd call them. Maybe he'd call George and say, "George, I don't know what they want."

George might huff a laugh and sit down. He'd be retired now and happy in his own place. Clint would have kept in touch with him, would have visited him out in Iowa or Idaho or wherever he decided to settle down. Clint would never have been adopted or anything, and he'd never have been fostered, but maybe they'd be friends. 

"Maybe they don't want anything," George would say, "except to help you realize your potential."

Clint would snort and come up with some witty retort to that, something like "What fucking potential?"

George would sigh, maybe. "Sometimes you have to let people help you, son," George would go on. "Sometimes that's okay."

"I'm not sure I know how to do that," Clint would confess. "I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to tell me that I need to run."

"The shoe might drop, or it might not," George would reply, sounding unconcerned. "You can't second guess every move they make."

"Sure I can," Clint would argue. "It's kept me alive this long, after all."

"Sure, but eventually you're going to have to decide that you trust them."

"Eventually, maybe, but not today."

"Maybe tomorrow then," George would finish, and Clint would be able to hear the smile in his voice.

"Maybe tomorrow," Clint would agree.

He finishes his shower and towels off before getting into bed. He thinks of his bow, of having backup, of Coulson's voice in his ear. He thinks of the quinjets and imagines what it's going to be like to learn how to fly.

Maybe tomorrow, he thinks, and drifts off to sleep. Maybe tomorrow, indeed.

 

5.

The thing about being captured is that there's an awful lot of hurry up and wait.

S.H.I.E.L.D. instructors like to give it fancy names like 'psychological conditioning' and 'the burden of expectation', but Clint's spent the majority of his life waiting for bad shit to happen. He knows that at some point the evil goons are going to come back and they're going to beat him up again. This isn't anything new. 

He'd like to sleep a little before then, only the low-level discomfort he's got from the dislocated shoulder and the broken clavicle makes that pretty much impossible. It's easier to go away in his head for a while. There are all kinds of things he could imagine; he spends a little time on a sandy beach somewhere. There's a crystal blue ocean and a brilliant white, shining sun. It's not enough to hold his attention, though, not when the goons come back and decide breaking that his fingers will get him to talk.

"Who are you?" the lead torturer demands. "Who do you work for?"

Clint keeps his eyes closed and concentrates. He likes his fingers and getting them broken really fucking hurts, so he decides to go someplace where he doesn't need them so much, anymore.

It's a scenario Clint hasn't let himself imagine before. It hurts too much, makes him want too much, but right now his hands hurt more. So Clint gives himself over to it, to the idea of a small house by the sea, someplace far away from Iowa.

He bought it cheap, maybe, from a friend-of-a-friend, and it needs lots of work. George lives down the street and Clint stays with him for a few weeks while he does the major stuff – fixes the hole in the ceiling, repairs the broken floor boards, gets the plumbing working again. Once he's done that he moves in and George drops by a couple of times a week. Ruth lives in the neighbourhood, too – she's a cook at the local diner and she'll drop food off for Clint, because he's tackling the kitchen now and "a man can only live off microwave dinners for so long".

"You know I'm not going to argue with you if it means you keep bringing me food," Clint would laugh. Ruth just grins.

After a couple of weeks, he starts to get to know the neighbours. Clint's not so good at networking but George and Ruth know people. The guy two doors down is really cute – Phil Coulson, works as a... Clint searches for something appropriate. The guy breaking his fingers shouts another question at him so Clint grabs the first thought to cross his mind.

A coffee grinder. No, no – a coffee expert. Yeah, he can see Coulson doing something like that. People send him specialty ground coffee and Coulson brews it in this ridiculous machine he's got in his kitchen and he spends his days writing reviews and reports and stuff.

Okay, Clint admits to himself, so maybe it isn't a real job or anything, but who cares – this is his fantasy, right?

So Coulson lives in a house down the street – no, no, he lives in an _apartment_ down the street – and he knows Ruth because he eats at her diner all the time despite the fact that the coffee there is crap. Clint meets him over breakfast one morning and they start to talk. They're good at talking, the banter that springs between them in the field coming just as easily when they're relaxed and not under fire. 

Clint doesn't know how they get together – maybe Coulson makes the first move, because god knows Clint would never do it himself. They aren't work colleagues, anyway, and Clint never joined the circus, so he's not an uneducated idiot Coulson wouldn't look at twice.

So Coulson makes the first move and they start dating. Clint shows him how to help around the house, but he's crap at it, so mostly he sits in the kitchen writing articles while Clint does the wiring or puts new tiles on the floor or finishes the drywalling in the living room. And he's only got an apartment while Clint has this whole house, so gradually his stuff starts moving in. Just a couple of shirts at first and then his movie collection and his netflix subscription and one day they look up and realize that they're already living together, so Coulson stops paying the rent on his apartment. By then the house is pretty much finished so they officially move in together.

He'd want to get a dog, Clint thinks as the evil goon breaks his second-last finger. The pain is pretty intense by now and this is coming on top of the beatings they've already delivered, so Clint knows he's not going to last much longer. Unconsciousness is trying to drag him under. The evil goon is yelling at him, demanding that Clint give up his name, but he concentrates on his fantasy instead. 

A dog, yeah. Clint would want to get a dog. He's not sure what kind of dog, maybe a mutt. Clint's always liked the idea of a mutt he trains himself.

He drifts off just as gunfire erupts from somewhere else in the facility. Clint smiles to himself as he passes out. 

A dog. He'd name it Lucky.

 

\+ 1

"Surprise," Phil says, sounding nervous. He removes the blindfold from Clint's head and steps away.

Clint blinks in the sunlight and looks up at the house. He swallows. He has to pinch himself to make sure it's real.

The house is almost exactly like what he's pictured on and off his entire life: two stories tall and weather-beaten. He can see three windows that'll have to be replaced and several shingles that are broken. The wrap-around porch that encircles the house needs some serious attention; it's probably a hazard the way it is. Clint knows that he can fix it. He's spent more time than he's willing to admit watching home improvement shows, teaching himself the basics of the skills he's always wanted to learn.

"The inside is nicer," Phil hurries to say, as if he's worried Clint doesn't like it. "I mean, obviously it needs a lot of work and the kitchen's probably too small. The pipes are good though, and the electrical is sound. I had a contractor walk through the place just to tell us what'll need to be taken care of first and what can wait until next year. It's a three hour drive from the city, four if traffic is bad, so we'll be able to get away on weekends. I know it's not ideal, but – "

Clint turns around and pulls Phil into a hug, burying his head against Phil's shoulder for a moment before he gives up and looks back to the house. "I love it," he confesses. 

"You do?" Phil asks, sounding relieved.

"I do, it's perfect, it's – god, Phil. You have no idea how much this means to me."

"I know a little," Phil says, holding him close. "You've mentioned before that you've always wanted a place of your own, something you could fix up. I looked for anything in the city, but it's nearly impossible to find something we could afford."

Clint shakes his head and looks back at the house. It definitely needs work. He's not even sure what town they're in, but he knows there'll be a hardware store nearby. There are pine trees dotted around the small property and grass that will need to be mowed. He's not sure how often they'll get a chance to make the drive, how much time they'll be able to spend here between missions and saving the world. Whatever time they have though, Clint knows they'll make the best of it. He imagines what this place will look like in the winter, in the fall. He can see where the Christmas lights will go up, where they could put the pumpkin on Halloween.

Better yet, he knows that Phil will be here with him, sharing this place and making it his own. He'll do the crossword puzzle at the kitchen table or frown at that weeds that have grown up around the house. Maybe Clint'll buy him an expensive coffee machine, just so he can see look on Phil's face when Clint brews him a cup.

He swallows thickly. "It's perfect, Phil," he tells his husband. "It's absolutely everything I ever wanted."

"I'm glad," Phil says, squeezing his hand. "Come on. Let me show you the inside."

 

The End


End file.
